I tell stories about how technologies are never neutral, but sometimes seem so—usually right up to
the point when we realize they've caused irreversible change.
I analyze the hidden patterns that often unintentionally determine our social, political, and
economic choices, and show why this means technological change is rarely as revolutionary as it seems.
Below is a selection of articles and book chapters I've written.
If you're interested in my new book, Programmed Inequality (MIT Press, 2017)
visit the book's page,
where you can read the
full introduction (free) online.

This article is part of an issue on cautionary tales put out by the IEEE Computer Society, and was written for an audience of
engineers as well as humanists. It discusses why failure narratives are as important to understanding the history of
computing as success stories, and explains how structural sexism has affected the progress of computing.

Discrimination in high technology fields, particularly computing, relies on a fiction of meritocracy.
This essay explores the history of gender, class, and race-based discrimination as elements that are
salient, designed-in features of technological systems. It argues that because such systems are
designed to concentrate and wield power, these forms of discrimination are (and have historically
been) integral, rather than unintended, unforeseen consequences.

This article rewrites the common "boys and
their toys" narrative of the history of computer dating. In it, I establish
that the first computer dating service in either the US or the UK was started
and run by a woman. The article goes on to discuss why this is little-known,
why her contributions have been submerged, and analyzes the way
heteronormativity structures how we write about the history of computing. It
concludes by talking about why attention to sexuality and the application of
insights from queer theory can help improve not just the history of computer
dating but the history of computing as a whole.
I also published a more narrative-driven version of this story in
LOGIC Magazine under the title
"The Mother of All Swipes," and it
made
Longreads.com's list of best science and technology articles for 2017.
Drafts of this paper were
presented at SHOT in Albuquerque in 2015, HSS in Atlanta in 2016, and at
Harvard's invitation-only symposium "From Missing Persons to Critical
Biography: Reframing Minority Identity in the History of Science, Technology,
and Medicine" in Fall 2016. I thank all of the discussants at those events for
their insightful comments, questions, and advice.

In this short article for the Computer History Museum's magazine I discuss how the history of computing gives lie to
one of our most beloved fictions: the idea
of technological meritocracy. I use the history of women in computing to show
how the problems we have with underrepresentation in STEM fields can never be solved by simply
stuffing more women and minorities into the beginning stages of the STEM "pipeline." For more on this topic, see the work of
Amy Slaton (Drexel University), particularly her book, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering:
The History of an Occupational Color Line. Slaton shows
how engineering education has perpetuated, rather than erased, inequalities of professional
and civil life for African Americans that it was somehow supposed to reconfigure.

This article is based on a research project undertaken with my undergraduates at Illinois Tech to determine how gendered
infrastructure, like bathroom technology, determines how freely people
can move about public space and how welcome or unwelcome they feel
within certain spaces. The end goal was to show how the values of earlier historical periods get embedded into technologies and
infrastructures that determine the patterns of our daily lives in the present--often in ways we do not notice and cannot easily change.
The exercises outlined in this article have been adopted and adapted for courses
by professors at several other universities, including Northwestern, Bryn Mawr, and Cornell. A draft of this article was presented
at SHOT 2013 in Portland, Maine; the Arthur Vining Davis Digital Humanities Workshop at Northwestern in August 2014;
and, the "Women's History in the Digital World" conference organized
by Monica Mercado at Bryn Mawr in May 2015.
To read more about the assignment and its outcomes, and to see a version of the map students created,
see this blog post, and also this followup
post.

In this short think piece I talk about the fallacy of projecting our obsession with the "boy genius" or "bright young men" onto computing
history and using these stereotypes as explanatory. I make the case that gendered and queered views of the
history of computing are one important way to see past our focus on only certain historical actors, to get at the subtleties of the field, and to
understand how computers really affect our present and future.

This article shows why women's strength in numbers in early computing work paradoxically hurt their image and
status in the field. For more on this topic see chapter 3 of my book Programmed Inequality
(MIT Press, 2017) available for through Amazon,
independent bookstores, or your campus or local library.

Why does the idea of meritocracy pervade how we look at the job market, even in the face of clear evidence that jobs are
not gotten through meritocratic means but instead arbitrarily divided along the lines of gender, race, and class? This
chapter examines the dynamic of labor feminization
in early computing, during a time when women had a very strong presence in the field. It shows how women's high numbers in computing
came into conflict with the British government's tightly held ideal of a meritocratic Civil Service. In order to get more men into the field,
the government silently, insidiously, and destructively used gender discrimination to undercut
the very concept of meritocracy itself. The entire volume of essays can be
purchased here.

Based on research done for my undergraduate thesis at Harvard, this chapter examines why truly coeducational initiatives came
late to elite universities like Harvard and Oxford, and why, when they did, they actually had negative consequences for the small number of
women on each campus. The article discusses why these moves towards further coeducation paradoxically had the effect of hurting the equality of
women students, faculty, and administrators at each University. If you'd like to read the rest of the essays in this book, you can
purchase it here.